The article is an explanation (defense?) of the author's library Powtils[0], which was created in February 2004[1].
Even in 2004 I think it would have been extremely unusual to write web applications in Pascal and serve them via CGI. The first edition of Lazarus was released in 2001, and the name gives a hint about Pascal's popularity at the time. From what I remember of that era, PHP was dominant and FastCGI was a popular way to hook it up to non-Apache webservers such as IIS.
> As this page is rendered with CGI, we don't get a Last-Modified for it. That's a CGI disadvantage :p
I'm assuming you already know that's false, based on the emoticon, but for anyone else reading... CGI gives you the flexibility to set (or not set) the Last-Modified header as you see fit.
Additionally, CGI is a pretty decent way to give web access to a static site generator. Write or copy your Markdown in a textbox, hit submit, md file is saved, SSG is run, done.
Since it's talking about Perl CGI websites, the decade for which it's relevant was the 1990s.
Phil Greenspun's book Database Backed Websites was published in 1997, and its coverage of CGI already started seeming rather quaint over the next few years as better approaches took over.
